Journalology #129: O Captain! My Captain!

New cOAlition S strategy; highly cited researchers; AI quality control

Nov 19, 2025

∙ Paid

Hello fellow journalologists,

This is the first newsletter that incorporates a paywall. As I explained last week, everyone will be able to read the news headlines, but the content that follows after the ‘fold’ will only be visible to paid subscribers.

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Before we get to the news headlines, I want to quickly draw your attention to the Academic Publishing in Europe (APE) conference, which is one of my favourite annual events. It’s always held in Berlin at the start of January, which is the perfect time to reflect back on what happened last year and to discuss the likely trends for the coming 12 months. I’m planning to attend (January 13-14, 2026) and I’d encourage you to consider it too. You can find out more about the line up of speakers here.

News headlines

cOAlition S reinforces Open Access commitment while advancing next strategic phase

cOAlition S today reaffirmed its commitment to the foundational mission of accelerating full and immediate Open Access while expanding its vision to encompass the broader goal of rapid, open, transparent, and equitable sharing of trustworthy scientific knowledge. Seven years after the launch of Plan S, the international coalition of research funding and support organisations has defined a new strategic plan to advance their joint efforts on open access forward (2026-2030).

JB: Science covered this announcement in a news story: After Coalition S disrupted scientific publishing, new plan retreats from strict requirements. You can read the 1-page summary of the new strategy here or the full document here.

cOAlition S launched in 2018 and immediately had a significant impact on publishers’ strategy, and not always in a good way. The new approach promotes the Publish-Review-Curate model, diamond open access and preprints.

I couldn’t find the word “transformative” anywhere in the strategy plan, which surprised me, although the Plan S pages for transformative journals, transformative agreements, and transformative arrangements still exist. Ah, those were the days…

Plan S sought to reduce open access publishing in hybrid journals by preventing researchers from using Plan S funders’ grants to pay for APCs in hybrid journals. It’s fair to say that didn’t work, with hybrid open access growing in recent years. Why? Because transformative agreements are paid by universities, not research funders.

The Drain of Scientific Publishing

Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries. These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, charging North American researchers over US$2.27 billion. The National Science Foundation budget that year was $ 9.1 billion and that of NSERC in Canada 1.1 billion.

JB: The last sentence from this extract is misleading as it gives the impression that 20% of science budgets in the US are used for paying two publishers, which is nonsense. Commercial publishers have corporate customers as well as academic ones; the US federal R&D budget for 2026 is around $181 billion.

Clarivate Announces Highly Cited Researchers 2025 List

Highly Cited Researchers demonstrate significant and broad influence in their field(s) of research. Each researcher selected has authored multiple Highly Cited Papers which rank in the top 1% by citations for their field(s) and publication year in the Web of Science Core Collection over the past eleven years. However, citation activity is not the sole selection indicator. This list, based on citation data, is then refined using other quantitative metrics, as well as qualitative analysis and expert judgment.

JB: You can explore the data here. The list can be helpful for editors looking to identify the key opinion leaders in their field. However, remember that citation metrics can be gamed by researchers. Clarivate is trying hard to strip those bad actors out of its list. Here are some related news items:

However, I’d rather you read this excellent opinion piece by Elizabeth Gadd instead: To reform universities, first tackle global rankings.

AI peer reviewers are fine with AI-fabricated papers

Artificial intelligence peer reviewers recommend the acceptance of unsound papers created entirely by AI more than 80% of the time, a new study has found. The authors of the analysis, posted Oct. 20 on arXiv without peer review, created 600 fabricated manuscripts using only GPT-5 and had three other large language model (LLM) tools — o3, o4-mini, and GPT 4.1—review them. All four generative LLMs were built by OpenAI. Despite discovering integrity problems with some papers, the AI reviewers recommended accepting studies up to 82% of the time, the study found.

JB: You can read the preprint here: BadScientist: Can a Research Agent Write Convincing but Unsound Papers that Fool LLM Reviewers?

I’m reminded of Dorothy Bishop’s prescient quip:

We could end up with a system where algorithms write the papers, which are attributed to fake authors, peer reviewed by fake peer reviewers, and ultimately evaluated in the Research Excellence Framework by machines. Such a system is likely to be far more successful than mere mortals, as it will be able to rapidly and flexibly adapt to changing evaluation criteria. At that point, we will have dispensed with the need for human academics altogether and have reached peak academia.

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